In A Beautiful Mind, the biography of mathematician John Nash Jr., Sylvia Nasar states: (p. 94)
Valleius, the Roman philosopher, was the first to offer a theory for why geniuses often appeared, not as lonely giants, but in clusters in particular fields in particular cities. He was thinking of Plato and Aristotle, Pythagoras and Archimedes, and Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, and Aristophanes, but there are many later examples as well, including Newton and Locke, or Freud, Jung, and Adler. He speculated that creative geniuses inspired envy as well as emulation and attracted younger men who were motivated to compete and recast the original contribution.
In her book, Nasar notes how Nash was inspired by John von Neumann’s invention of game theory and was motivated to reformulate von Neumann’s approach involving two-person, zero-sum games, by building a model of n-person, non-cooperative games.
Similarly, when Richard Feynman visited the Chicago World’s Fair as a teenager, he observed the adulation that was attributed to Einstein for his brilliant work in relativity theory and quantum physics. He was inspired to become a physicist and eight years later, visited Einstein at Mercer Avenue to discuss a time reversal approach to resolve some issues in quantum physics. Feynman ultimately became involved in intense competitions with Schwinger and Gell-Mann to remodel quantum physics. At first, Feynman attempted to ignore the work of his competitors so that he could take an original approach. However, he realized that it takes too long to “reinvent the wheel” and he tapped into the research of others to learn what had been done. He was then able to go ahead and develop his unique path-integral approach to describing the movement of elementary particles in quantum physics.
The “take-home message” from these, and many more examples, is that your competitors in any endeavor can be an important knowledge resource for achieving your goals, and your struggle to outperform them can be a powerful motivator for you. Enjoy the competition and the urgency it spawns because this is the hothouse environment that has incubated many great discoveries.
